A&E Spotlight

Bad things happen to good people. Vicki Gunvalson has known this to be true since watching her father, who she adored, first display signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s at age 59 (he would die eight years later, in 1997). At the time, in the late 1980s/early 1990s, life was crumbling around Gunvalson in ways she’d never

When you joined Styx in 1999, you had a significant following in Canada as a solo artist. Was it a difficult decision to give that up for a globally renowned band that had a complicated recent history? On the one hand, you’re knocked out and flattered by the honor of joining a band with a

Lawrence Gowan was 12, and two years into his keyboard training, when his parents finally purchased a family piano. As he sat on the bench and prepared to raise the roof on his Canadian home just outside of Toronto, his father asked him to slide over. “He riffed into about three hours of music,” Gowan

There always had been an undercurrent of momentum to Wade Allyn Hallock’s prodigious talent as a Miami-based interior designer, one that rivaled a game of telephone. This client told that friend. That friend became a client. And so on. Better still, Hallock purposely flew below the radar with an air-of-mystery approach that his increasingly exclusive

Can you imagine trying to start a rock career today in the current entertainment climate? That would be really hard. Today, there’s so little importance placed on originality. Everything is so image-oriented. It seems like there are 95,000 different genres that are all separate from each other, and you have to fit yourself into one.

When asked if she noticed a heightened enthusiasm for live concerts as musicians like herself began taking the stage again last year, Ann Wilson admits that it was hard to tell. “You look and see this sea of masks—and all you see are eyes,” says the iconic rock vocalist. “You can’t see any facial expressions.

Take us into the war room with your team as the impact of COVID-19 was crystallizing. How did you begin to assess all the different needs, and where to make an impact, understanding that things were changing on a daily basis? I was receiving so many calls from nonprofits. Once everyone realized that [COVID-19] was

When Ted Lange picks up the phone on an early February afternoon, his voice is as instantly recognizable as the double finger guns that became his trademark gesture during a decade-long run (1977-86) on television’s The Love Boat. But while the small screen brought him fame as Isaac Washington, the beloved bartender on the hit

By the time Iron Maiden takes the stage later this May in Croatia for the continuation of its “Legacy of the Beast” world tour—which started in 2018 before being sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic—it will have been nearly three years since the heavy metal band last played live. It’s the longest stretch of inactivity for

For the better part of 30 years, one of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players has been hiding out in plain sight as a monkey astronaut, a fun-loving vampire, a talking telescope—and countless other characters in cartoons that children watch every day of the week. It’s a second act as an esteemed voice

You conducted so many fascinating interviews on SportsLook/Up Close, in large part because they revealed something about the person we didn’t know or hadn’t heard. Your interview with broadcasting legend Howard Cosell in the 1980s was interesting because of how contentious he was. What do you recall about that conversation? For a few years, Howard

It was raining hard the day that a future Los Angeles Lakers legend named Kobe Bryant arrived at ESPN studios in 1996 for his first sit-down with the sports network’s renowned interviewer, Roy Firestone. Suddenly, lightning hit the building and blew out the studio lights. Firestone explained that the repairs would take a few hours,